CHAPTER 17

Managua, Nicaragua

December 1991

OVER THE ENSUING WEEKS since their unlikely encounter on the beach, Grey and Andrenov met regularly. Their photographic journeys took them away from the city and into the villages and hinterlands of this nation not far removed from the conflict between the Sandinistas and Contras. There was still a sizable U. S. presence in Nicaragua, but engagement was cautious at best after the fallout from the Iran-Contra affair. It was no coincidence that these remote locations kept them from the prying eyes of U. S. counterintelligence agents and chance encounters with other embassy personnel that would require explanation. Grey enjoyed the companionship and the ability to speak freely in his mother’s native tongue. He knew he was being assessed and recruited, of course, but like a lonely spouse who wasn’t getting enough attention at home, he enjoyed being on the receiving end of the chase. For the first time in his life, he felt wanted. Andrenov believed in him and trusted him to be the spy the CIA didn’t think he could be.

When the ask came, there was no great philosophical pitch or movie theatrics; it was simply a favor from one friend to another. Grey was scheduled to return to Langley and Andrenov asked if he might be able to look up something for him in the archives, something personal. As a token of their friendship, Andrenov also gave Grey a gift just before he departed: his olive-green Bundeswehr-marked Leica M4. To a layperson, the camera looked like something one might pick up at a garage sale, but to a photography buff like Grey, or any auction house, it was a priceless treasure. That it was a fake, a Leica painted and engraved by the technical division of the GRU to mimic the famed collector’s piece, was a fact that Grey would never discover.

Upon his return to the States, Grey set about returning the favor to his newly adopted Soviet father. He found Andrenov’s first request to be an odd one. He didn’t ask for details of a classified weapons program or even the identities of any U. S. intelligence assets working in Russia. His request was ancient history by Agency standards: the identities of the MACV-SOG team members who ambushed and killed a group of Soviet military advisors in Laos in 1971. It took some digging, but Grey found the after-action report of Reconnaissance Team Ozark, a mixed U. S. and South Vietnamese special operations unit attached to the Phoenix Program. Led by a U. S. Navy chief petty officer, Team Ozark had been tasked with a series of cross-border missions to interdict communist supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The team’s report was among the records from the CCN Compound near Da Nang, where Agency and SOG personnel based many of their classified operations. Though the paper reports had been converted to microfiche and were cumbersome to sift through, Grey did his research the way he lived and worked, unnoticed by anyone. RT Ozark reported executing a near ambush on a three-vehicle convoy on the Laotian side of the border, killing all the enemy troops with a combination of claymore mines, 40mm grenades, and small-arms fire. Among the dead was a Caucasian male dressed in the uniform of a Soviet army officer.

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